8.30am: Why is the leader's speech at a party conference such a big deal? Politicians give speeches all the time, but mostly what they say only gets noticed by those of us who are fascinated by the intricacies of Westminster politics. We forget that, for a majority of voters, politics is largely a dull blur.

But the keynote conference speech is different. It's the only day of the year on which an opposition leader can deliver a speech and more or less guarantee that it will receive 10 minutes of detailed attention at the top of the evening news.

Ed Miliband has been leader of the Labour party for a year now but many people don't know much about him. ("For many people, Ed Miliband has yet to make an impression – a point which several in the [focus] groups illustrated by presenting a blank card, or choosing a picture of grey clouds, representing nothing in particular," was how Lord Ashcroft put it in a recent report on what polling says about the party leaders.

Ashcroft is a Tory, but his polling research is robust.) Miliband has been working on his speech since July and, by any standards, this is a big moment for him. It's his chance to fill in the blank card. I'll be covering the speech, and the reaction to it, in full.

But there's also a full programme of conference business this morning. Here's a full agenda.

9.30am: Conference opens with a speech from Gareth Thomas, the Labour MP and chair of the Co-operative party.

As usual, I'll be covering all the conference news, as well as looking at the papers and bringing you the best comment from the web. I'll post a lunchtime summary at around 1pm and another after Miliband has delivered his speech. My colleague Paul Owen will then take over for the rest of the evening.

8.39am: There's bad news for Labour in the Independent this morning. The paper has a poll showing a) that the Conservatives are ahead of Labour and b) that only 24% of voters see Ed Miliband as a credible prime minister in waiting. Here's an extract from the Indie story.

The Conservatives are on 37 per cent (down one point); Labour on 36 per cent (down two); the Liberal Democrats 12 per cent (up one) and other parties 15 per cent (up two). Such a result would leave Labour 12 seats short of an overall majority at a general election. Some Labour MPs worry that the party should be further ahead as the Coalition's spending cuts bite.

One year after be became Labour leader, Mr Miliband's personal ratings also trouble some of his party's MPs. In the poll, 24 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement that he is a credible Prime Minister-in-waiting, with 57 per cent disagreeing.

A third of people who intend to vote Labour do not view him as a credible premier, with only a narrow majority (54 per cent) saying they do. Only 13 per cent of Tory supporters and 24 per cent of Liberal Democrat supporters agree.

8.40am: Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, has played down suggestions that Labour will boycott the elections for police commissioners taking place next year. According to PoliticsHome, this is what she said when she was asked about a possible boycott on BBC News.

That is not what we have been proposing. We do obviously have to look at because the legislation has gone through.

8.45am: It wouldn't be a proper Labour conference without speculation about the leadership. Ed Miliband's position is safe, but, luckily for those of us who love a good leadership contest, there's one getting under way in Scotland. Labour is changing its rules in Scotland and for the first time the entire membership in the party will choose the leader, not just the Labour MSPs.

The Labour MP Tom Harris wants the job, even though he does not sit in the Scottish parliament. On the Today programme this morning, he explained where Labour had been going wrong in Scotland. The quotes are from PoliticsHome.

It is almost as if the devolution in 1999 - and that was a terrific event - but then it seemed to me that the Labour party almost thought - that is it, job done and walked away and what we should have realised is that it does change the structure of parties and the structure of the overall country and I just feel we didn't really engage as much as we should have and we are paying the price for that now.

9.06am: In the comments yahyah wants to know how Ed Miliband's ratings compare with those of other opposition leaders at this stage in the electoral cycle.

9.14am: Hazel Blears wore a brooch saying "Rock the Boat" when she resigned from the cabinet. This morning she's given an interview to Radio 5 Live, and her motto still applies. Here are the main points. I've taken the quotes from PoliticsHome.

• Blears said the public were not listening to Labour at the moment.

I don't think anybody in the Labour party at the moment is cutting through if we are honest about it. We are a year or so after the worst election defeat in 30 years and it is quite a long haul back. I think Ed has just got to stick at it, as does everybody in the Labour party, keep our nerve and keep going.

Photograph: Rex Features/Rex Features

• She conceded that Ed Miliband was not "the most charismatic figure in the world".

You know Ed might not be the most charismatic figure in the world and all these comparisons to Blair are unfair. One of the things in the polls which is encouraging is that twice as many people in the country think that Ed Miliband understands people like them and gets the fact that they are under this incredible pressure in their day to day life than does David Cameron.

• She said Labour should support the public rather than trade unions on the issue of strikes. "Most Labour leaders have never supported strikes,'" she said. "It is not a matter for the Labour party to be supporting strikes. If Trade Unions decide that is what they are going to do then, that is what they are going to do.

9.26am: And here's some more on Ed Miliband's leadership. The SNP have released details of an ICM poll showing that satisfaction with Miliband's leadership is lower in Scotland than in anywhere else in Britain. People were asked if Miliband was doing a good job or a bad job as Labour leader. In Scotland 30% said he was doing a good job and 56% said he was doing a bad job, giving him a net satisfaction rating of -26%. This was lower than anywhere else in England or Wales. The average figure for Britain was -14%.

9.40am: On Twitter people have been sending me more links to articles that address the question of how Ed Miliband is doing compared to other opposition leaders. (See 9.06am.) So here's a full reading list.

They show how all leaders of the opposition suffer declining poll ratings in their first year; it's during the second year the ones that go to be prime minister start to really connect with voters and see their numbers improve accordingly.

Labour, then, should hold its nerve. Yes, Ed Miliband's ratings are poor; but this is an interim judgement by voters who, by and large, are paying little attention to the Labour Party. The time that matters will be a year from now, when the government has been in power for two years and the impact of its policies, especially spending cuts, is being felt on the ground. If Labour fails to win back the London mayoralty and Miliband's ratings are still weak, that will be the time for the party to think long and hard about how to win the next general election, and who should be party leader.

As he enters his second year, he needs to keep an eye on the qualities marked out by the Fabian Review focus group as most important for a good leader: Integrity, decisiveness, and communication and listening skills. Currently voters rank him well on the first and last of those, while Cameron maintains a daunting lead on the middle two.

9.56am: The conference is now underway. We've already had a speech from Brendan Barber, the TUC general secretary, (I'll post some quotes when I've read the text) and there's now a short debate on phone hacking. Len McCluskey, the Unite general secretary, is speaking now. He thanks Ed Miliband for standing up to Rupert Murdoch and he says that there is a link between the way Murdoch treats his workers and the behaviour of his journalists.

Conference, there is a moral and political continuum that leads straight from Wapping to Millie Dowler, from union busting to phone hacking, from trampling on your own workers to corrupting the police. And it's time we recognised it openly and clearly. Murdoch's minions did all of this because they thought they could get away with it, that they were above the law, and for years they were right.

Labour needs to learn lessons, he says. "They won't be learnt by standing on the banks of the Jordan blessing Murdoch's children," he says.

The phone hacking affair shows that independent trade unions are essential in ensuring that wealthy media barons do not get it all their own way, he says.

Labour must not become "the party of the establishment", he says. The establishment already has two parties (the Conservatives and the Lib Dems).

Len McCluskey. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

The biggest lesson will have been learnt when we understand that we cannot become the party of the establishment, whether it is Murdoch or the bankers or the corporate giants. The establishment already has two parties in the government of coalition. We must be the party of the people, standing up against unaccountable and corrupt power. A party that is no longer seduced by the glamour of the ultra-rich.

10.02am:Tom Watson, the Labour MP who campaigned against phone hacking is speaking now.

He makes a link between the Sun's coverage of the Hillsborough disaster and phone hacking. When Rupert Murdoch found out that that the Sun had lied about Hillsborough, he did nothing, Watson says. The same approach applied to phone hacking.

After two years of investigating, I can tell you how the hacking scandal happened. A newspaper out of control. Police failure. Politicians failing to act. It's the same. When [Murdoch] saw what the Sun did, the lies it invented about Liverpool fans stealing from the dead, Rupert Murdoch could be in no doubt what went on in his newspapers. Yet what did he do at the Sun or any of his other newspaper? That's right. He did nothing. They lied and cheated and broke the law. They defiled the dead and mocked the murdered did nothing and Rupert Murdoch kept the change.

Murdoch turned that money into a stack of cash. He bought more newspapers and TV stations, "all of them infected by sickness", Watson says.

Watson says phone hacking must have spread to other papers. He says that Dominic Mohan, the editor of the Sun, used to tell jokes about phone security at industry events. (That's a reference to this story that appeared in the Guardian's media diary in 2002.) Watson predicts that "it's only a matter of time" before the Sun is found in the evidence file of the convicted private investigator who hacked Millie Dowler's phone.

Do you really think that hacking only happened on the News of the World? Ask Dominic Mohan, the current editor of the Sun. He used to joke about lax security at Vodafone when he attended celebrity parties. Ask the editor of the Sun if he thinks Rupert Murdoch's contagion has spread to other newspapers. If he gives you an honest answer, he'll tell you it's only a matter of time before we find the Sun in the evidence file of the convicted private investigator that hacked Milly Dowler's phone.

Watson says the Times is shutting down its BlackBerry phone network. "I hope they are not deleting the records," he says.

Watson says Labour was partly to blame.

We got too close to the Murdochs. We allowed them to become too powerful.

But Labour "got there in the end", he says.

Now our leadership must spearhead seeing the reforms through. It is not just about the News of the World or just about phone hacking. Murdoch should also tell us about the computer hackers, the people who left Trojan devices on computer hard-drives enabling them to read emails. If we're going to have the truth, let's have the whole truth.

Watson says Murdoch's company is a company "sick with corruption and criminality from top to bottom". That much has been proved, he says.

The Murdochs and their minions have consistently and blatantly lied to our courts and our parliament. Institutional investors have a responsibility to put these things right. They need to act.

Watson says Labour should tell Ofcom what they think of James Murdoch.

I would not put him on the board of an ornamental garden. He is certainly not a fit and proper person to chair a major broadcaster.

10.31am: I've beefed up the post at 10.02am with more quotes from Tom Watson's speech. Chris Bryant, the other Labour MP who has been campaigning against phone hacking for years, has also just delivered a very strong speech on the topic. I'll post full quotes from it in a moment.

10.48am: Here's what Chris Bryant told the conference in his speech on phone hacking.

This time last year I was thrown out of the party - the News International party. I'm glad to say that at this party there isn't a News International party to be thrown out of.

Phone hacking has been a scandal "on so many different levels", he says. It's a scandal that so many workers lost their jobs at the News of the World.

I think it's a scandal that the Metropolitan police refused point blank to investigate, poured scorn on the Guardian journalists who were investigating it and then tried to use the Official Secrets Act to shut them up. That's wrong.

I think it is a scandal that people have lied, and lied, and lied to Parliament. I have got my researcher - poor old Rees - to count the lies – 486 lies to Parliament. That is wrong too.

There is a bigger scandal, because it is the monopoly that BSkyB have. The fact that they've got 80% of the pay- TV market and 95% in the pay-TV market in many places. They can hoover up television rights, and hardly produce a decent programme of their own. That is one of the things that we should be dealing with - the monopoly at BSkyB.

Bryant says a bigger scandal is the fact that Labour allowed this to happen.

It was not the party's finest moment, he says.

I think in the future we should choose our bedfellows with a little bit more care.

And I hate to get party political, but there is the scandal about the Prime Minister as well. A man who was far too gullible, far too keen to please Rupert Murdoch, far too arrogant about hoping that he would never be found our that he never asked Andy Coulson the proper questions and took that man into Downing Street.

That's because Tory policy on media at the general election was the Murdoch policy. Dave's line was Rebekah's line. George's line was Andy's line. Absolutely wrong. So I believe we have to change media ownership in this country. We have to replace or reform the PCC, but we've also got to find some backbone ourselves.

Chris Bryant Photograph: William Fernando Martinez/AP

No longer a creepy crawly party to the media. There is only two qualities that matter in politics - courage and persistence. Tom Watson has shown it in spades, Ivan Lewis has shown it in spades, Ed Miliband has shown it in spades, and that is why he needs to be our Prime Minister.

11.11am: Ivan Lewis, the shadow culture secretary, wrapped up the debate on phone hacking. The full text is on the Labour website. Here are the key points.

• Lewis called for tougher press regulator. And he suggested that a new regulator should have the power to order journalists to be "struck off" - ie, banned from working - if they commit gross misconduct.

Neither the current broken system of self regulation or state oversight will achieve the right balance. We need a new system of independent regulation including proper like for like redress which means mistakes and falsehoods on the front page receive apologies and retraction on the front page. And as in other professions the industry should consider whether people guilty of gross malpractice should be struck off.

(Does anyone know how this could possibly work? Journalism isn't a profession with entry requirements and academic demands. They let anyone it. That's why James Cameron insisted that it was a trade, not a profession.)• Lewis said Rupert Murdoch should never have political influence in Britain again. This came in a passage that he addressed directly to Murdoch.

Your newspapers and Sky TV are popular with millions of British people. Some people in our Movement might find that uncomfortable but it's true. However, and yes Conference, we should have said this a long time ago. Mr Murdoch, never again think you can assert political power in the pursuit of your commercial interests or ideological beliefs. This is Britain, Mr Murdoch. The integrity of our media and our politics is not for sale.

• Lewis said Labour was encouraging firms in the creative industries to make internships available to everyone. The party has set up a creative industry network and it will pilot a fairness pledge "to encourage these historically closed industries to open up their internships, apprenticeships and jobs to people based on talent, not social background or family networks". He said Channel 4, Virgin Media, UK Music, The Royal Shakespeare Company, the Advertising Association and the Sharp Project had agreed to sign up.

• He suggested that top footballers were paid too much. He did not say this explicitly, but he made a comparison between the amount of money spent on top wage and the amount spent on grassroots football.

The Premier League is a tremendous commercial success and in many ways has rejuvenated our national game. But can it be right that last year they turned over £2bn and top flight players are earning an average of £72,000 per week. While the Football Foundation's funding which supports improvements to local pitches and changing facilities can only scratch the surface of need and is now being cut. Surely, not only the kids but the thousands of soccer and hockey mums and dads, volunteer coaches and organisers who are the hidden heroes of our grassroots sport have a right to ask how this can be fair. They have a right to expect our party to ask those questions.

11.47am:Angela Eagle (left), the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, has delivered her speech to the conference. She didn't have anything new to announce. (Her boss, Ed Balls, dealt with that yesterday.) But we learnt about her political heroine.

I haven't spent the past 35 years in politics fighting for Labour values to let a government led by the privileged few, for the privileged few, carry on killing opportunity for the many.

And we also learnt about one of the female politicians she doesn't admire.

[The Lib Dems have] got as much chance of surviving at the next election as Sarah Teather has of starting a career as a stand up comedian.

Many of the delegates did not seem to get the joke, but those of you who were reading my live blog from the Lib Dem conference last week will understand. Eagle said that if delegates did not believe her, they should watch the clip on YouTube.

12.03pm: In the comments RClayton has pointed out that my post about Yvette Cooper playing down the prospects of Labour boycotting the elections for police commissioners (see 8.40am) clashed with our story about Cooper leaving the prospect open. That's partly because what politicians say can be interpreted in different ways. But it's also because Labour have been uncertain about what to do.

We've now had a bit more clarity. This is what Vernon Coaker, the shadow police minister, has said.

It is likely that we will field candidates, however no decisions have been taken.

12.13pm:Mary Creagh, the shadow environment secretary, has delivered her speech to the conference. The full text is on the Labour website. Here are the key points.

• She said Labour were beginning to win council seats in rural areas like Witney, Cornwall and the Forest of Dean. The fight against the privatisation of forests had helped Labour in these areas, she said.

Labour is the party of the countryside. The first time I said that in Parliament, the Tories laughed. They're not laughing now.

12.45pm: Here's a lunchtime summary.

• MPs and delegates have launched ferocious attacks on Rupert Murdoch's media empire. In a debate on phone hacking, the MP Tom Watson said that Murdoch's company was "sick with corruption and criminality from top to bottom". He also said that James Murdoch should stand down as chairman of BSkyB. Len McCluskey, the Unite general secretary, said there was "a moral and political continuum that leads straight from Wapping to Millie Dowler, from union busting to phone hacking, from trampling on your own workers to corrupting the police". Chris Bryant MP said Labour should stop being "a creepy crawly party to the media". (See 9.56am,10.02am and 10.48am.)

• Ivan Lewis, the shadow culture secretary, has suggested that journalists who commit misconduct should not be allowed to write for newspapers. "And as with other professions, the industry should consider whether people guilty of gross malpractice should be struck off," he said in his speech to the conference. This would effectively turn journalism into a licensed profession. He also suggested that top footballers were paid too much. (See 11.11am)

• Brendan Barber, the TUC general secretary, said in his speech to the conference that if the strike over public sector pensions goes ahead in November, the workers would win the support of the public.

I hope that we will be able to resolve this dispute through negotiation and there is still time, but if that proves impossible, then at the end of November, an unprecedented array of unions will make common cause in a TUC day of action. The government will try to turn the wider community against the teachers, nurses, home helps and all the other dedicated members of the public service workforce with lies about gold-plated pensions. I am confident that they will fail and we will win the battle for public support and for fairness.

• Lord Adonis, the Labour former transport secretary, has urged Labour to start talking to the Lib Dems about areas where they can work together.

Of course the Lib Dems are in Coalition with the Conservatives at the moment. So the issue for now is getting a dialogue going where we have particular points of common interest. So, for example, the conference this morning was debating media regulation. And on the issue of media regulation, plurality, all of the scandals that followed the collapse of News of the World, we have a strong common interest with the Lib Dems ... On issues like that over the next year or two – party funding is another issue, House of Lords reform is another issue – we should talk to the Lib Dems, and let's see where that leads to in due course.

How bitterly disappointing it is to learn that Ed Miliband plans to resurrect the weary trope of the deserving and the undeserving poor in his conference speech later today. In arguing, amongst other things, that those in work ("good" neighbours) should be given preference over the jobless in allocating social housing he creates an ugly differentiation that isn't a million miles from Ken Clarke's post-riots reference to a "feral underclass".

1.30pm: I haven't had time to do a full round-up of the papers, but here are three columns worth reading.

Already I wonder whether the headlines about apologies will reassure voters or reinforce a view of incompetence. "Sorry we screwed up the economy – Vote Labour" is not a winning slogan. I can't recall Margaret Thatcher apologising, or being called to do so, in the build-up to the 1979 election when she was Leader of the Opposition and promising to sort out the unions. There were no pompous demands for her to say sorry for being in the cabinet that presided over a three-day week. She strode on, incrementally building up support for an alternative to the failed consensus of the 1960s and 1970s, working with those still stuck in the past in her party until she was strong enough to dump them.

• Rachel Sylvester in the Times (paywall) says Labour still has to show that it can govern without increasing spending.

Labour, whose record is based on spending in public services, has not yet developed a credible narrative about how to govern when there is no money to spend. Even this week the emphasis has been on proposals that have a cost attached — a cap on tuition fees, a VAT cut, a national insurance break. Although individually these may be popular, the public are worried about what they see as a "throw money at the problem" approach. One Blairite former Cabinet minister thinks Labour should immediately after the election have adopted a "Darling Plus" strategy — somewhere between the former Chancellor's promise to halve the deficit over four years and the current Chancellor's austerity package. This would, he argues, have given the party sufficient credibility to be able to advocate some short-term fiscal stimulus at a later stage if that becomes necessary. Instead the Eds have, if anything, advocated Darling Minus.

• Philip Stephens in the Financial Times (subscription) says that, under Ed Miliband, Labour still has a credibility problem.

Mr Miliband badly lags the prime minister in the leadership ratings. Baldly put, he has failed to leave an imprint on the nation's consciousness. Even in Liverpool, activists struggle to recall anything much memorable about his first year. Many still wish the party had chosen his brother David for the job. True, the Labour leader bested the prime minister during the furore about telephone hacking at Rupert Murdoch's News International. That showed some courage. But I would wager that no one beyond the political beltway much noticed.

All the while, the Labour leader has presided over a perceptible drift back into the party's comfort zones. He has a serious point when he says that the financial crash marked the failure of the neo-liberals' brand of unfettered markets. But he is not going to rebuild Labour's economic credibility by proposing a cut in Value Added Tax or lower university tuition fees.

1.52pm: My colleague Paul Owen has just been to see Liam Byrne talking about how Labour can "win back the middle". He's sent me this.

Byrne, who is the shadow work and pensions secretary and is leading Labour's policy review, said his party needed to establish a "different kind of welfare state", one focusing on "working people" rather than the unemployed. "The big picture for those in the squeezed middle is how you rebuild the welfare state for working people … We should be the party that says: 'No matter who you are and where you're from, if you work hard, you should do well.' That is not a commitment the Conservative-led government is going to match," he said.

This new welfare state involved "a different kind of childcare system, "creating a new supply" of social housing, which was "right now practically non-existent" for new tenants, and finding a "fairer way of encouraging more people to save for retirement".

Byrne said the government needed to be much more active and interventionist "in the way that we were beginning to pioneer towards the end" of Labour's time in office. The government should be "identifying our strengths, doing a much better job at coordinating procurement and investment". There was an "investment crisis" in the UK, and "now is the time to examine the case for a national investment bank … because we've got to begin taking action on unlocking that money".

Byrne told an anecdote meant to illustrate that voters cared only about the future, not the past. Bill Clinton was wandering rural Arkansas after losing office as governor. He asked a farmer why he had got kicked out. Hadn't he done a good job? The man replied: "Yeah, you got paid to go to work." Byrne said: "People expect us to do a good job."

And he told a joke about David Cameron having failed to "seal the deal" with the electorate. Byrne said he was stuck in a traffic jam on the motorway on the way to Ikea. Someone came along the hard shoulder knocking on all the windows, and said: "David Cameron and George Osborne have been kidnapped by bandits and they're going to burn them alive unless they're given £1m. We're collecting for them."

"On average how much are people giving?" Byrne asked.

"About a gallon of petrol each.

2.07pm: Ed Miliband is walking to the conference centre now with his wife, Justine. His speech is due to start in about 10 minutes. He says it''s a beautiful day.

2.23pm: Ed Miliband will be speaking shortly. Norma Stephenson, the chair of the national executive committee, opens the session with a joke about Miliband not being available.

She says the conference is going to hear from other people. She starts by showing a video of the Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi says that people take party conferences for granted in countries like Britain. But in countries like Burma they realise how valuable democracy is, because they don't have it.

She says Labour has a proud history of working for the common man. In Burma the opposition are trying to do the same.

2.33pm: They are now showing a video with other figures endorsing Ed Miliband, like Tom Watson and Sir Alex Ferguson.

2.35pm: Ed Miliband is coming on now. The final clip on the video is Sir Alex Ferguson saying: "Ed Miliband is the leader of the Labour party." (Thought we know that, Alex ...)

2.36pm: Ed Miliband is speaking now.

He starts with a reference to Neil Kinnock's famous conference speech in 1985.

A generation ago a Labour leader came to Conference to condemn the behaviour of a Labour Council in Liverpool.

Today I come to Liverpool, proud to hold our Conference in this great city.

(This is a line about how Liverpool has changed, not a snub to Kinnock.)

2.38pm: Miliband pays tribute to his wife Justine. He thanks here for her love. And then he talks more about his family.

Ask me the three most rewarding things I've done this year.

Being at the birth of our second son Sam.

Then getting married.

It is 2011 after all.

And starting to tell Daniel, my older son, the stories my Dad used to tell me.

My kids, Daniel and Sam.

A new generation of Miliband brothers.

(Now Miliband is talking about his family. In the past he has been relatively reluctant to parade his family before the media, but when he arrived at the conference on Saturday he was photograph with his wife Justine and two young children. No 10 was watching. A day later, a picture of David Cameron with son at a football match appeared on the front page of the Daily Telegraph.)

2.41pm: And now he moves on to another key event in the Miliband household

And of course one other big event happened in my life, one that the media was really interested in:

My nose job.

July 27th.

They called it Ed Nose Day.

I hadn't heard that before. It's rather a good joke.)

He's still talking about his nose.

I had a deviated septum and it needed repositioning.

Typical Labour leader.

He gets elected and everything moves to the centre.

2.42pm: Miliband turns to the economy.

This is a dangerous time for Britain, and for Britain's economy.

The Government's austerity plan is failing.

You can sense the fear that people have as we watch the economic crisis that stalked our country in 2008 threatening to return.

Stock markets round the world falling.

The United States in difficulty.

The Eurozone struggling.

And people in Britain losing their jobs.

Now is not the time for the same old answers.

(There's an echo in that of Gordon Brown's "no time for a novice" line in 2008.)

2.44pm: Miliband says he has a fundamental disagreement with the government.

They believe Britain can address our problems of debt without addressing our problems of growth.

They are wrong.

Think of how you pay off the credit card bill.

You need to make savings in the household budget.

But if you lose your job and the money stops coming in, you can't pay off the bill.

(This is a response to George Osborne's charge that Gordon Brown "maxed out the credit card". It was a vivid metaphor, and Labour strategists believe that it helped the Conservatives considerably in the run up to the election.)

2.45pm: Miliband is still on the economy.

A year ago, lots of people thought the Government was taking the right course.

The Governor of the Bank of England.

The International Monetary Fund.

But one person in particular stood outside the consensus.

Labour's Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls.

He was right.

But he is not interested in being proved right.

And nor am I.

I am interested in the Government doing the right thing by the British people.

2.47pm: Miliband says he has learnt a lesson this year.

That's the lesson I have learnt about this job and myself over the last twelve months.

To be true to myself.

My instincts.

My values.

To take risks in the pursuit of that.

And to stand up for what is right.

2.48pm: Miliband says he learnt how important it was to be decisive during the phone hacking affair.

The moment it came home to me most was when I heard the terrible news that Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked.

Someone had hacked into the voicemails of a missing teenager.

Deleted them from her phone.

Given her parents false hope.

As Justine said to me that morning, it was sick that someone could do that.

That's why I had to speak out.

I knew when I said what I did that I was breaking rule number one of British politics.

Don't mess with Rupert Murdoch.

I did it because it was right.

(Apparently this is referred to as the "sod it" moment by his aides. After a conversation about whether or not to go on the offensive against Murdoch, Miliband said "sod it" and decided to take the risk.)

2.50pm: Miliband goes on about the importance of being his own man.

That's the lesson I have learned most clearly in the last year.

The lesson that you've got to be willing to break the consensus, not succumb to it.

You know, I'm not Tony Blair.

I'm not Gordon Brown either.

Great men, who in their different ways, achieved great things.

I'm my own man.

And I'm going to do things my own way.

That is what it means to lead.

The line about not being Tony Blair gets a particularly loud cheer. This is probably the most popular passage in the speech so far.

2.51pm: Miliband says Labour has to take risks.

Nobody ever changed things on the basis of consensus.

Or wanting to be liked.

Or not taking risks.

Or keeping your head down.

It's a lesson for me and it's a lesson for my party too.

2.53pm: Miliband says Labour must not expect to return to power easily.

My message to the public is this:

We know waiting for the Tories to fail won't win us back your trust.

And we won't deserve your trust if that's what we do.

Paying homage to past leaders won't win us back your trust.

And we won't deserve it if that's what we do.

Asking to carry on where we left off in government won't win us back your trust.

And we won't deserve it if that's what we do.

(This is an attack on what's known as the "one more heave" theory of winning elections.)

2.55pm: Miliband says the British public are decent. When the riots happened, far more people came out to clean up than were involved in the rioting.

When we talk about the places where the riots happened, let's remember that the vast majority of people who live there are decent, law-abiding, community-spirited.

We must punish those who do wrong.

But I'm not with the Prime Minister.

I will never write off whole parts of our country by calling them sick.

We are not a country of bad people but great people.

2.57pm: Miliband is talking about how Britain got to be as it is now.

Some of what happened in the 1980s was right.

It was right to let people buy their council houses.

It was right to cut tax rates of 60, 70, 80 percent.

And it was right to change the rules on the closed shop, on strikes before ballots.

These changes were right, and we were wrong to oppose it at the time.

2.58pm: But some of what happened was based "on the wrong values".

New Labour rebuilt schools and hospitals.

Good times did not mean we had a good economic system.

We changed the fabric of our country but we did not do enough to change the values of our economy.

You believe rewards should be for hard work.

But you've been told we have to tolerate the wealthiest taking what they can.

And what's happened?

Your living standards have been squeezed by runaway rewards at the top.

You believe we owe duties to each other.

But in our economy you've been told that duties to each other come second.

And so while many companies do the right thing and train their workforce, others do not.

3.00pm: Miliband is still speaking about the moral flaws in society.

In our economy, you've been told the fast buck is ok.

And what's happened?

We've ended up with a financial crisis and you've ended up footing the bill.

You believe in a society where everybody is responsible for their actions.

But you've been told that if companies are big enough or powerful enough they can get away with anything.

And what's happened?

Big vested interests like the energy companies have gone unchallenged, while you're being ripped off.

And he identifies Sir Fred Goodwin as an example of all that went wrong.

Take Fred Goodwin, who ran the Royal Bank of Scotland.

He was at the heart of the banking crisis.

Compare him to Sir John Rose, former Chief Executive of Rolls Royce, a great British business leader.

Creating wealth and keeping jobs in this country.

He is the true face of British business ...

But at the time of the financial crisis, Fred Goodwin was paid over three times more than Sir John Rose.

I tell you something, Fred Goodwin shouldn't have got that salary.

And I tell you something else:

We shouldn't have given Sir Fred Goodwin that knighthood either.

3.03pm: Miliband says Britain is still a country where "the rungs of the ladder grow further and further apart" and where the "network of connections" still counts.

But he suggests that his personal background makes him ideally placed to tackle these problems.

What's my story?

My parents fled the Nazis.

And came to Britain.

They embraced its values.

Outsiders.

Who built a life for us .

So this is who I am.

The heritage of the outsider.

The vantage point of the insider.

The guy who is determined to break the closed circles of Britain.

3.06pm: Miliband is talking about welfare.

We must never excuse people who cheat the welfare system.

The reason I talk about this is not because I don't believe in a welfare state but because I do.

We can never protect and renew it if people believe it's just not fair.

If it's too easy not to work.

And there are people taking something for nothing.

And if at the same time people who have paid into the system all their lives find the safety net full of holes.

No wonder people are angry.

3.07pm: Miliband says there has to be a new bargain. And he says this applies to business too.

Let's confront head on the big challenge we face of building a new bargain in our economy.

Built on values of hard work, something for something, the long-term.

We need a new era of wealth creation in this country.

But it will not happen with the old set of rules ....

You've been told all growth is the same, all ways of doing business are the same.

But it's not.

You've been told that the choice in politics is whether parties are pro-business or anti-business.

But all parties must be pro-business today.

If it ever was, that's not the real choice any more.

Let me tell you what the 21st century choice is:

Are you on the side of the wealth creators or the asset strippers?

The producers or the predators?

3.10pm: Miliband identifies the care home firm Southern Cross as an example of a "predator" company.

Look at what a private equity firm did to the Southern Cross care homes.

Stripping assets for a quick buck and treating tens of thousands of elderly people like commodities to be bought and sold.

They may not have sold their own grandmothers for a fast buck.

But they certainly sold yours.

They aren't the values of British business.

It must change.

This gets a huge round of applause.

3.11pm: Miliband is obviously worried about being attacked as anti-business, because he has included a riff about how this stance is actually a pro-business one.

And don't let anyone tell you that this is the anti-business choice.

It's the pro-business choice.

Pro-business on the side of the small businesses who can't get a loan.

Pro-business on the side of high value manufacturing that can't build its business because of the short-termist culture.

Pro-business on the side of the British company losing out to its competitors abroad when their government steps in and our government stands aside.

3.13pm: Miliband says that the government has let down firms like Bombardier, BAE Systems and Sheffield Forgemasters. This prompts a joke about Nick Clegg - Miliband's first reference to him in the speech.

Having Nick Clegg as the local MP didn't help [Sheffield Foregemasters] much.

You know, the boundary review means his seat will be represented by a Tory after the next election.

No change there then.

3.15pm: Miliband says tackling climate change is essential. He says over time there will be upward pressure on energy prices. That is why the market has to be reformed.

Let's break the dominance of the big energy companies.

Let's call a rigged market what it is.

And get a fairer deal for the people of Britain.

3.19pm: Miliband says he knows some in Labour would like the party to abolish tuition fees. But he can't promise that.

It wouldn't be responsible to make promises I can't keep. That's Nick Clegg's job.

3.20pm: Miliband says it is unfair that "a quarter of our schools don't even send 5 kids to the most competitive universities."

Here is my challenge to those schools and Universities.

Raise your game.

To the schools not doing enough I say:

Lift your ambition, lift your sights.

To the Universities not opening up I say:

Open your eyes, open your doors.

Say to the very brightest children at every school: if you get the grades, you'll get a place.

3.22pm: Miliband says he wants to end top pay being set by "cosy cartels".

We've got to put an end to the idea that those at the top can take whatever they can, regardless of what they give back.

It's why we must end the cosy cartels of the way top pay is set in our economy.

So every pay committee should have an employee on the board.

3.24pm: And Miliband launches into his strongest attack on David Cameron.

Have you noticed how uncomfortable David Cameron is when he has to talk about responsibility at the very top?

He found it easy to be tough on you.

VAT went up.

He called it a tough decision.

Tax credits were cut.

He said they couldn't be afforded.

Help paying for childcare was hit.

He said it was the only thing he could do.

When you have had to pay, it's always necessary, it's always permanent, it can never be reversed.

And yet at the same time they are straining at the leash to cut the 50p tax rate for people earning over £3,000 a week.

Only David Cameron could believe that you make ordinary families work harder by making them poorer and you make the rich work harder by making them richer.

It's wrong.

It's the wrong priority.

It's based on the wrong values.

How dare they say we're all in it together.

This gets a huge round of applause.

3.26pm: Miliband says he believes in the "value of work". Labour is the party of work, he says.

3.28pm: Miliband turns to health. He says Cameron promised that he was different, that he would look after the NHS.

But he "went back on every word he'd said", Miliband says.

Hospitals to be fined millions of pounds if they break the rules of David Cameron's free-market healthcare system.

The old values that have failed our economy now being imported to our most prized institution: the NHS.

Let me tell David Cameron this.

It's the oldest truth in politics.

He knows it and now the public know it.

You can't trust the Tories with the NHS.

The delegates love this. It's getting the longest round of applause we've had so far.

3.31pm: Miliband is now into his peroration.

If you want someone who will rip the old rules so that the country works for you, don't expect it from this Prime Minister.

On the 50p tax rate, on the banks, on the closed circles of Britain, on welfare, on the NHS, he's not about a new set of rules.

He's the last gasp of the old rules.

The wrong values for our country and the wrong values for our time.

You know Britain needs to change ...

I'm up for the fight

The fight for a new bargain.

A new bargain in our economy so reward is linked to effort.

A new bargain based on your values so we can pay our way in the world.

A new bargain to ensure responsibility from top to bottom.

And a new bargain to break open the closed circles, and break up vested interests, that hold our country back.

I aspire to be your Prime Minister not for more of the same.

But to write a new chapter in our country's history.

The promise of Britain lies in its people

The tragedy of Britain is that it is not being met

My mission.

Our mission.

To fulfil the promise of each so we fulfil the promise of Britain.

3.40pm: Here's some instant reaction to the speech from the Twittersphere.

From Labour's Bob Ainsworth

Ed spot on with emphasis on producers skills and the real economy.

From ITV's Tom Bradby

Overall, the only thing that will worry the Tories is the line that you can't trust them on the NHS. Because that clearly has cut through.

From the Telegraph's Benedict Brogan

Great to hear a big argument from Ed M but if it's broke then picking winners and protectionism isn't the answer

From Channel 4's Michael Crick

A New Bargain" another way of saying Roosevelt's "New Deal"

From the Daily Mail's Tim Shipman

The most establishment Labour leader since Gaitskell an outsider? Pull the other one, Ed.

From the Sunday Telegraph's Matthew d'Ancona

This is like the 'forces of conservatism' speech rewritten by Tony Benn

From Labour's David Hanson

Good strong value based speech from ed m at conference

From ResPublica's Philip Blond

Ed's best attack line on Dave so far - you make the richer work harder by making them richer and the poor work harder by making them poorer

Foolish of Miliband saying universities shd tell comprehensive pupils: 'if you get the grades you'll get a place.' Not enough get top grades

3.55pm: My colleague Michael White has written his verdict on the speech. It will be going up on our website shortly, but here's a taster.

Some good lines uttered, some false notes struck, some bad luck sustained when the TV feed broke for five minutes mid-speech. But it still requires a generous leap of faith to conclude that Ed Miliband's speech to Labour's Liverpool conference will persuade wary voters that they have got him wrong and he is ready to be prime minister if the call comes soon.

3.56pm: Deborah Hargreaves, the chair of the high pay commission, an independent inquiry into high pay, has put out a statement welcoming what Miliband said about executive pay.

Ed Miliband is right to slam the take what you can get culture at the top of some of our biggest companies and right when he calls for a break-up of the cosy boardroom remuneration committees. It cannot be fair that top executives are taking massive pay awards year in year out even while they ask their workers to take redundancies or real term pay cuts.

Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats have made it clear that they will take action on excessive rewards at the top of companies. One question remains - will the Conservatives also back this essential change?

After such a pro-small business speech from the shadow chancellor yesterday, we are disappointed that the Labour leader does not understand how jobs and apprenticeships are created in the real world.

Small businesses already struggle to win public sector contracts and insisting that they must offer an apprenticeship will mean that they miss out on more. While more than 60% of apprenticeships take place in small businesses, until firms win more business they will not have the confidence to take on additional staff. Policies such as this will only make the problem worse.

From John Cridland, the CBI director general

With growth weak, Ed Miliband is looking for a new business model, but he must be careful not to characterise some businesses as asset strippers. We need businesses to create the wealth and jobs upon which our country's economic recovery will depend.

Equally, businesses must be responsible. The companies I meet are working tirelessly to create wealth and jobs in extremely tough times.

Ed Miliband is right to encourage long-termism in business. Responsible businesses are those committed to investing in their workforce and innovative products and services.

4.04pm: When Ed Miliband said he was not Tony Blair, there were cheers from the audience. But there was also some booing too. Alistair Darling, the former chancellor, said that behaviour was "ridiculous".

Darling also liked the speech. "I like the realism that we are in difficult times," he said.

4.07pm: And here's some union reaction to the speech.

From Dave Prentis, the Unison general secretary

Ed's passionate speech hit the right buttons. It showed he genuinely cares about Labour values, public services and our great NHS, values that will resonate with the people of this country. His plans would help to offer young people hope - with jobs and higher education. He recognised the role that every working person plays in creating wealth in our economy, and that includes public sector workers, and putting fairness back at the heart of sustainable economic growth is key to creating the kind of society we want to leave to our children.

From Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB union

Ed Miliband is right to separate the wealth creators from the asset strippers and to side with the producers against the predators. He is right to stand up for the NHS. He is his own man not afraid to stand up against the likes of Murdoch and the rest of the elite. He will be listened to by the electorate because the issues he raises are major issues. He is on the side of the British people and he wants to stop the rip offs from wherever they come.

4.12pm: David Stringer has posted this exchange on Twitter.

Reporter: Are you going to take on the unions Mr. Miliband? @Ed_Miliband: No, I'm going to have a cup of tea

4.17pm: Lord Falconer, the former cabinet minister and close friend of Tony Blair's, has said that the speech did not represent a swing to the left.

I don't think he did move to the left. I think there were two things in particular that I though indicated he was talking to the wider public. Welfare has got to be on the basis we've got to encourage work; we're a pro-business party. Two strong themes, indeed they were probably half the speech.

And there's more reaction on our Comment is free rolling blog. It includes the response from Jenni Russell, the Guardian columnist, who described the speech as "the single worst political speech I've heard in 20 years".

4.26pm: Four LabourList commentators have posted their views on the speech on LabourList. Here's an extract from the post from Mark Ferguson, the LabourList editor.

It was great to hear a Labour leader speak about work and working life - a little less so to hear him praise the Thatcherite social reforms of the 1980s. But this speech wasn't for me. I was meant to be left happy enough. the party was meant to think this was B+. And that's what I'd give him. He didn't need an A, he just needed to avoid a C. He's crossed the hurdle.

Let's move on - we won't remember that speech when the next election comes.

4.33pm: Here's some more reaction from the Twittersphere.

From the BBC's Evan Davis

One might argue that in stressing good versus bad behaviour, Ed M's speech has parallels to Major's Back to Basics.

For me,one problem is that most people and most companies are neither all good or all bad -- we mostly have a bit of both in us.

From the Telegraph's James Kirkup

Miliband offers a "new bargain" with Britain: Buy one Ed, get one free.

From Luke Akehurst, a Labour activist

I thought that was a good explanation of what a centre-left govt can do when there's no extra cash: change values + rules of society

From the Times's David Aaronovitch

My (unscientific) twitter impression of reax to Ed's speech is the left loved it, the right had contempt for it, the neutrals unconvinced.

From the Guardian's Tom Clark

Anyone else think the delivery of Ed's speech had slight echoes of Charles Kennedy – does the low-key stuff best

4.44pm: The Institute of Directors doesn't like Ed Miliband's speech. Miles Templeman, its director general, has put out this statement.

We would like to know how Ed Miliband plans to identify and reward 'good' companies over 'bad' ones. In practice, we think he would find this neither straightforward nor desirable. He should have more faith in customers and investors to decide. In the modern business place price is not the sole determining factor affecting people's buying and investment decisions. Consumers and investors are better equipped and better informed than ever to impose discipline on firms than any government. Instead of proposing that the state makes choices that are likely to be simplistic and wrong he would be wiser to find ways of boosting competition so that the customer remains king.

4.54pm: Paul Goodman, the former Tory MP who writes for ConservativeHome, says in a post that this was a cynical speech.

Tony Blair wasn't in the hall. Nor was Gordon Brown. (And nor, for that matter, was David Miliband.) But Miliband's greatest admirer among former Labour leaders was present: Neil Kinnock. Right at the start, the present leader alluded to the past one - and what was probably Kinnock's finest hour, his courageous Liverpool conference speech attack on Militant. But which tough target did Miliband bravely attack today? Fred Goodwin. That was about the measure of it.

5.02pm:Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, has put out this statement about the speech.

Much was made in this speech of the need for change and a new way forward, but sadly there are not many new answers. Schools do their very best for their pupils but aspirations mean little if young people cannot afford higher or further education, or find a job. We also need to see a return in our schools to a stimulating curriculum that is relevant to all our children.

Ed Miliband made much of the excellent comprehensive education he received. The academies and free schools programme will simply drive divisions in our society even further and needs to end. Labour needs to commit itself fully to the level playing field of a comprehensive education system which is democratically accountable to the local community.

Pro-government corporate media are already crying foul. And no wonder. Ed Miliband's speech today was the most radical delivered by a Labour leader for a generation.

Sure, it was low on policy detail and there were predictable issues that plenty of his supporters will disagree with, from welfare to Afghanistan.

But Labour's leader made an unmistakable political break today with the unrestrained market consensus of recent decades: denouncing the "failure of a system" that had delivered a "crisis of the promises made over the last 30 years".

In his speech to the Labour Conference, Ed Miliband is getting close to finding a language that speaks directly to the people of Britain. He is quite right to say that something hasn't just gone wrong in the very bottom of society – it's gone very wrong at the top as well.

There has been a culture of lawlessness among the very rich, among journalists and among parliamentarians just as much as on council estates, and Ed Miliband is being very bold in highlighting this. His speech is just as much a critique of the Blair-Brown years as it is of David Cameron, and what he is attempting to do is to articulate the anxiety of the squeezed people of middle Britain.

After this speech, Ed Miliband has moved out of the shadows of the last Labour government, but he will need to guard against the instincts of some in the party whose interest is more in a quiet life of Tory-bashing than the inconvenience of winning three elections. Today allowed Ed Miliband to set out his vision: now he must put flesh on the bones, all the while ensuring that his argument maintains the hard edge that could provide the makings of a winning manifesto.

Labour figures believe David Cameron was onto something when he started talking about "ethical capitalism" in 2009. They feel he then abandoned such talk when he became prime minister, and reckon that Ed Miliband now has the opportunity to capture that ground.

Two moments summed up the speech. The biggest cheer was for that old saw 'you can't trust the Tories on the NHS'. Mr Miliband would have been better off tackling the Tories favourite applause line 'you can't trust Labour with the economy'.

The second biggest cheer was more of a jeer. A jeer against Tony Blair. The man who won three general elections.

I just ran into one David Miliband supporter who said: 'Anyone who says we don't know Ed Miliband is mad. We know who he is. He is a North London liberal who wants to drag the party to the left.' Quite so.

This is a party that wants to fail. In Mr Miliband it has found a new, but not very rousing, means of doing so.

5.27pm: This is what Lady Warsi, the Conservative party chairman, is saying about the speech.

What we heard today was a weak leader telling his party what it wanted to hear.

He's moved Labour away from the centre ground and come up with no solutions to the something for nothing culture that he helped Labour create.

All he promised was more of the same spending, borrowing and debt that got us into this mess in the first place.

5.31pm: And this is from George Guy, acting general secretary of the construction union Ucatt.

Mr Miliband's total commitment to creating decent apprenticeships is particularly welcome in the construction industry, where short term thinking is creating a growing skills crisis.

5.31pm: Time now for a summary. I was rather underwhelmed by the speech after Ed Miliband finished. But having read it properly, and having had time to mull it over, my assessment of it has gone up. Here are some thoughts.

• Ed Miliband is serious about tackling capitalist excess. There was a lot of fuzz in the speech - see below - but after this speech it will be very hard to argue that we don't know what Miliband stands for. We do. It's clobbering fat cats. No wonder the Labour left are feeling chipper.

• But Miliband doesn't yet seem to have a clear idea as to exactly who the badies are - or what he's going to do about them. There was a very clear statement of intent in this speech.

We need the most competitive tax and regulatory environment we can for British business.

But when I am Prime Minister, how we tax, what government buys, how we regulate, what we celebrate will be in the service of Britain's producers.

In policy terms, that last sentence was the most important line in the speech. But Miliband did not really elaborate, beyond saying that major government contracts would have to go to firms that offered apprenticeships. And who are the badies? Miliband made the distinction between "wealth creators" (good) and "asset strippers" (bad), or "producers" versus "predators". But it is extraordinarily hard to say which is which (as the IoD has quite reasonably pointed out - see 4.44pm.) Many firms do a bit of both.

• Miliband isn't going to have to keep saying he's his "own man" any more - because he has proved that he is. He has been using the "own man" line all week. Now he can drop it, because it is obvious that he is a quite different sort of leader from Tony Blair or Gordon Brown.• But there's a touch of David Miliband in this speech. When the Guardian published the full text of the speech that David would have given at last year's conference if he had won the Labour leadership, we found that he was planning to call for "a moral economy built on moral markets". That's exactly what this speech was about. Embarrassingly, though, "moral economy built on moral markets" is a better soundbite than any in Ed's speech.

• Portraying himself as an insider/outsider was astute. It was a way of making a link between the personal and the political. Astute, but also questionable. Ed Miliband was brought up in the heart of the Labour establishment. Arguably he is more of an insider than Gordon Brown, who felt that being Scottish and not having gone to Oxford held him back. And he is much more of an insider than John Major, who never went to university and never felt at home in posh, establishment London. Miliband said that having the "heritage of the outsider" and the "vantage point of the insider" made him the ideal candidate to "break the closed circles of Britain". As I said earlier, the soundbites need some work.

• Miliband struck a chord when he attacked David Cameron on the NHS. He described Cameron as "the last gasp of the old rules". I wasn't convinced that that worked. But his passage about Cameron betraying his promises on the NHS was powerful, and illustrates quite how dangerous this issue could be for Cameron at the election.

That's it from me, Andrew Sparrow. My colleague Paul Owen will carry on blogging here into the evening.

6.24pm: Hi, this is Paul Owen taking over from Andrew Sparrow for the evening. I've just been sitting in a sunny Hay Festival-style marquee on a patch of scrubland beside the conference centre, listening to Douglas Alexander, Sadiq Khan and others discuss whether Labour can win in 2015.

Graphic

Alexander began by warning against complacency. "It's easy when you're in the conference bubble to convince yourself everything's going Labour's way," especially after Ed Miliband's "powerful" speech, the shadow foreign secretary said. But "no one should underestimate the scale of the task we face".

However, he said he was optimistic that Labour could win the next election because "the common sense of the time is up for grabs". The Tories' language caught the public mood after the 2008 crash, he said, but now Labour had the chance to do that. Alexander praised the "colloquial and correct" part of Miliband's speech when the Labour leader said you could not pay off a credit card if you had lost your job. There was a "broadening coalition between low-income and middle-income families" that Labour could use as a base of support, he said, calling this "a coalition of anxiety".

One of Labour's main advantages was that it was unified, Alexander said. "Unity does not guarantee victory, but it is the essential prerequisite of victory."

(I think no one could deny unity is an asset, but since Tony Blair and Gordon Brown won three elections despite an increasingly bitter division between them, it can't quite be true that it's essential.)

Sadiq Khan, the shadow justice secretary and lord chancellor, said he had "the longest title in the shadow cabinet and I'm the shortest member of the shadow cabinet. For those at the back, I am standing up."

Labour's advantages, Khan said, included "the huge numbers of normal young people at this conference … There were lots of young people here in the 1990s, but they were all wearing suits, they were aspiring MPs." The young people in Liverpool this week were here because they were inspired by Miliband, he claimed.

In addition, "we've got an amazing bunch of MPs from different backgrounds who have the time and the space … to develop policy going forward". And, because of the coalition's plan for fixed-term parliaments, "we know the date of the election" and "that means we can have a sense of calm".

He admitted that it was frustrating that "the Ed we know the public haven't quite seen", and said the "fly in the ointment" was the forthcoming boundary changes, which he said had been designed by the government to do Labour "the most damage electorally".

But he said Labour could win because it had the right leader, it was united, the Tories still needed detoxifying and the government did not understand the problems of the UK or have the right solutions. He said the fact the Lib Dems spent most of their conference last week emphasising how they had stopped the Tories doing terrifying rightwing things "will have compounded the public's perception of how nasty and toxified the Tories' brand is".

I had to duck out of that debate early to get a seat to see the Observer's Andrew Rawnsley interview Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary. I'll be covering that live from 6.30pm.

6.34pm: Cooper and Rawnsley have taken their seats, and the crowd are now watching the video I just posted.

6.38pm: The crowd really like Harriet Harman's comment that there was "rather more interaction" than she realised between Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper when Balls worked for Gordon Brown and Cooper worked for Harman.

6.41pm: There has been an incident at a colliery in her Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford constituency. There are reports that two miners are trapped underground. "There are experts on the site and they are working hard," Cooper says, seeming on the verge of tears. She explains her emotional reaction by saying her mum was from a mining family in Whitehaven, Cumbria. The sense of community around the mining industry was partly because of the risks, she says.

6.45pm: Her household was not party-political, she says. Her mother was "very much Christian, but without God … That's the Church of England for you." They moved south with her father's job.

Was she a rebel or a swot at school? "A bit of both … Nearer to the swot" but "her first experiences of industrial action were at school". She got the prefects to go on strike because a classmate had been either sent home or sacked for being a prefect for wearing white socks. "We were successful. He was reinstated."

6.50pm: Is she scary? "When you're working with civil servants you're under pressure and trying to get to the heart of things, and I would get frustrated," she says.

She studied PPE at Oxford, at the same time as Ed Miliband and James Purnell. She knew Purnell but "hardly ever talked politics". They both enjoyed student theatre, she says. Just like Tony Blair and David Cameron, says Rawnsley. She says Miliband remembers her shouting at him, but she doesn't. "I might have maybe shouted less if I'd known" he was to become Labour leader.

She and Miliband shared a flat later on. "I don't remember him doing any cooking … I think the odd occasion he tried it wasn't very successful … but I'm not really one to talk." But he is "quite tidy", she says.

She got a first at Oxford, went to Harvard and the LSE, and then became a researcher for John Smith, the late Labour leader, and worked for Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign too. She says James Carville's famous line "it's the economy, stupid" also had a subclause: "and don't forget healthcare".

6.52pm: She had to deal with Americans saying they did not want "socialised medicine". "You should be so lucky to have the NHS," she says, to cheers from the room.

Did Clinton ever make a move on her? "On the one occasion I shook his hand there was no noticeable interest," Cooper says.

6.55pm: Cooper talks about having ME soon after she began working for Harman. "It meant I was off work for about a year. I spent a lot of time watching Richard and Judy." She was so drained she could not go out to get a newspaper. "Even to do that and get back again, that was it, it would sort of finish you for the rest of the day."

It made her think about other people who aren't very mobile, she says. In your early 20s you take for granted that you can move fast, she says.

It's "definitely not" a psychosomatic illness as some claim, she says. "When you have a chronic illness, some people become depressed," says Cooper.

Who were the people who helped her through it? "Ed [Miliband] was very supportive"; they shared a flat at the time. Her mother would come and bring food.

7.01pm: Rawnsley tries to skip her two-year period at the Independent, but Cooper brings it up. "I just thought I should try something different … It was an interesting thing to have a go at."

Cooper says journalists are driven by wanting to know what the next big story is, but in politics you want to do things.

She worked for John Prescott after becoming an MP; "he was great." Did she ever shout at him? No. Did he shout at her? "He would shout at rooms I was in … There were many occasions when he would shout at everybody in a room."

Was she Gordon Brown's spy on Alistair Darling when she was chief secretary to the Treasury? "You have to work for the chancellor, not the prime minister" in that job, she says. She had an evening of trying not to answer Brown's phone calls. The No 10 switchboard are great at tracking down anyone.

7.04pm: Very few people stood up to either Brown or Blair, and you need that in politics, she says. So it was good that at least they stood up to each other.

7.09pm: Rawnsley says online questioners were furious about her introduction of Atos tests when in government. These are assessments on whether people should get sickness benefits or not. Is Cooper satisfied it was all done in a proper and humane way? "No," she says. "There clearly is a problem with, if you get high levels of appeals being successful, there clearly is a problem with the original assessment, not necessarily the test, but the assessment."

She had suggested changes before the election and does not know now which changes have been implemented.

"I think it was the right thing to do to change the assessment … and bring in a new system with more support for people but also a stronger test." It's a good thing to get people back to work if they can work, she says. "What the government should be doing is reviewing the implementation and making changes if you have to." But it was not wrong to change the system, she says.

Labour had proposed a system of help through the Future Jobs Fund. "All that has gone," she says.

7.13pm: Was the 2010 election ever winnable for Labour? The Tories had a "huge series of weaknesses", she says, and it is significant they did not win outright. The biggest problem for Labour was "we got trapped into … fighting an election on fear rather than hope". She contrasts that with Clinton's 1992 campaign. "If you're a progressive party, you have to be on the side of optimism."

What Brown did during the 2008 financial crisis was "phenomenal". "If we had that leadership now it would be more reassuring." So Brown did have strengths. But "he was never a touchy-feely politician" and was bad with the media. She acknowledges that in some ways - such as his "style of making speeches" - Brown seemed out of date.

7.19pm: Should Brown have been replaced? No one has ever described a convincing process to her of how that would happen, Cooper says.

Why did she not stand for the leadership after the 2010 election? Some people said I was letting women down, she says. Cameron says she wasn't allowed to stand. "That may be the way they run things in that household … "

Actually, her husband, Ed Balls, said he would stand aside and she "ought to stand", she says. Rawnsley enjoys himself doing an impression of Balls "rolling over in bed" to tell her this.

But she did not want to stand because of her dedication to her children. "I think it's the feminist thing to say it if it's true," she says, getting a round of applause.

You could have both stood, says Rawnsley. "That would have been entertaining for you, wouldn't it?" Cooper says. "It's a complicated balancing act with family life," she says. How does she cope? "Thank goodness for Grandma … Grandmas are the fourth emergency service."

She was the first minister to take maternity leave, Cooper says.

On the miners, the Press Association has said that reports say one miner has been rescued while efforts continue to bring the other to the surface. The National Union of Mineworkers told BBC Online that the second man had been located.

7.20pm: Ruth Kelly, her former Labour frontbencher colleague, told her "new mums should not change a nappy for the first month … There's so much else to do." She managed to enforce that rule, she says.

7.24pm: The three children took her name not Balls's. Why? "I always wanted that to be the case … Why not?" But "you choose your moment" to have a discussion like that - just after the baby has been born. But she backs off from talking about this, saying it is too personal.

How did she feel about the pictures of Balls and colleagues playing football earlier this week? "It's Ed's very loud, clear way of saying he's doing his bit for the squeezed middle."

7.29pm: Who does she most admire? "My mum. I have to say that, given how much she does for us, and just for being so supportive to everybody. The stock answer everybody gives is Nelson Mandela, but it's still true." In domestic politics: Harriet Harman. That gets applause.

Does she still support "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime"? "Yes. It works. It cut crime by 40%." Under Tory governments, crime always goes up. "It's something to be proud of, we should stick with it and we should do it again," she says, getting another round of applause.

Didn't the criminals all just come out of prison and reoffend, Rawnsley asks. Cooper says there were 7m fewer crimes a year. "It was hugely important," she says, and "a lot of it was about crime prevention".

7.32pm: Were the sentences for the student protesters unnecessarily harsh? She does not want to comment on individual cases. It's up to judges.

What about the August rioters? "Individual decisions again obviously have to be for the courts … Overall I do think though it is appropriate for the overall sentencing to reflect the fact that this was in the context of the riots," which were an aggravating factor, and therefore it was appropriate to give higher sentences. Judges are sending a signal that "the rule of law has to be respected".

7.38pm: The government should not be making 20% police cuts, she says. "It's just madness," she says, and "irresponsible". The government's cuts are also "cack-handed". "They're making a mess of it." A royal commission is needed to look at it, and if the government does not set that up, Labour will set up an inquiry, something she is going to announce in her speech to the conference tomorrow.

The government wants police officers to wear their uniforms on the way to work. The Police Federation don't like this idea. "It was thrown up as a gimmick," Cooper says. Police officers will still do things when they are off duty "because they take their responsibilities very seriously". But they are also entitled to privacy and a family. "They just may not want to draw their children into that public role."

7.41pm: Asked about the media, Cooper says the worrying thing with News International was politicians felt the company was too powerful to take on. But politicians do have to talk to the media because that is the way most people find out about politics.

Rawnsley says NI staff would get the front row in the press pen for leaders' speeches at Labour conferences gone by - but that was not the case today. "The phone hacking has been a big moment," says Cooper, and was a "big moment" for Miliband. Some people advised him not to criticise Rupert Murdoch, but he used his judgment and did it anyway, she says.

7.42pm: Should she have been first choice over her husband for shadow chancellor? "I think Ed Balls is doing a great job as shadow chancellor. This is the job I wanted to do." But she liked her time as shadow foreign secretary too; when she was asked to be shadow home secretary she was sitting in a cafe on the banks of the Seine.

7.44pm: She praises Balls for his Bloomberg speech during the Labour leadership contest - which was hailed for taking apart the government's arguments on the deficit when others were avoiding the topic.

7.45pm: What do the two most argue about? "Directions." Direction of the Labour party? "Directions on the motorway." After one awful incident they both separately bought each other a satnav for Christmas. "I ended up arguing with the satnav instead - because it was wrong! It really was wrong!"

7.49pm: Are she, Balls and Miliband "Brown leftovers"? People are much more interested in what happens next, not the past, Cooper says.

Which specific cuts relating to policing would Labour implement? 12% cuts to police budgets over a five-year period, she says.

Do they still have a way to go to restore the voters' trust in the economy? What they have to started to establish is "there is an alternative", she says. You're arguing against the feeling that if two parties agree on something, they must be right. It's an "uphill struggle" for Labour, Cooper says, "but you have to go for what you think is right".

7.52pm: Is it a problem the Labour leadership all come from the same middle-class Oxbridge background? She says she came from a comprehensive where very few people had ever gone to Oxford. "It has been a huge step forward for us having more women," she says. "That does make a difference." They do need people from different backgrounds, but they "do better than the Conservatives".

Will she ever run for leader? "Ed's doing a good job … I think he will lead us back into government." The lesson Labour learned from the Brown-Blair era was that all this leadership speculation is "bad for the party and we shouldn't do it".

7.55pm: Labour's record at bouncing back from election defeat is gloomy, says Rawnsley. Why should this time be different? She talks about when she was chief secretary to the Treasury in 2008 and got a phone call saying "we may have to nationalise RBS". She says the "cards [may be] thrown in the air" in such a dramatic way again. "It can be done. The Tories didn't win the last election … We can do it but only if we pull together and are serious about the challenges we've got ahead."

7.57pm: That's it from me for the night. Click on guardian.co.uk/politics in the morning for live coverage of all tomorrow's Labour conference events from Andrew Sparrow.